A conventional bandwidth request procedure is described below with reference to FIG. 1.
FIG. 1 illustrates the conventional bandwidth request procedure.
When an uplink resource is allocated to an Advanced Mobile Station (AMS), the AMS fragments or packs a MAC protocol data unit (PDU) taking into consideration the allocated bandwidth. When the AMS fragments or packs a MAC PDU, the AMS may add an extended header or remove a generic MAC header (GMH). The actual size of such a generated MAC PDU may differ from the size of a resource (or a resource unit) that the AMS has requested from an Advanced Base Station (ABS).
In FIG. 1, the AMS requests a 1502-byte uplink resource from the ABS. However, the ABS allocates only 1000 bytes. Thus, the AMS divides (or fragments) a payload of the PDU into two payloads and adds a fragmentation and packing extended header (FPEH) to each of the two payloads and adds a GMH to the second payload. Here, assuming that the FPEH and the GMH are each 2 bytes, the AMS needs 6 more bytes.
However, the ABS allocates, to the AMS, 502 bytes which have not been allocated to the AMS among 1502 bytes requested by the AMS. Then, the AMS divides a second PDU into two units since the AMS cannot transmit the second PDU using the allocated 502 bytes. Therefore, the AMS requires 4 more bytes.
As a result, the AMS requires 10 more bytes since the PDU is divided twice. This increases latency and wastes resources.
FIG. 2 illustrates an example in which the AMS pads an allocated resource. As shown in FIG. 2, 56 bytes are needed to transmit two 16-byte ARQ blocks. However, if the AMS separates the two ARQ blocks to configure PDUs when the ABS has allocated 55 bytes to the AMS, the first PDU is 40 bytes. Accordingly, of the allocated 55 bytes, 15 bytes are padded. Then, to transmit the second PDU, the AMS additionally requests a resource.
Although a MAC management message is discriminated (or identified) basically using two connections, a flow ID currently used for the MAC management message has only one value. If the MAC management message is discriminated using only one flow ID, it is difficult to identify a delay sensitive message among MAC management messages and therefore it is difficult to provide services suitable for MAC management messages.